A spin-off of EPFL Valais based at the Energypolis Campus, cleantech start-up Urbio received a Tech Seed loan from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT) and convinced Urban Us, a leading investor focused on climate and cities, to invest in their project.
Urbio is the first "generative design" software for the planning and dimensioning of technologies to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and reduce their carbon emissions.
Urbio combines the analytical forces of humans with advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to generate optimized plans based on hundreds of criteria, such as CO2 emissions, technical parameters of renewable technologies, renovation rate, energy prices or costs for all stakeholders. Based on early applications, the time spent on design tasks can be divided by 10, while improving the cost of solutions and carbon efficiency by 15%.
A Tech Seed loan and eight pilot projects with industrial partners
In February 2021, Urbio received a CHF 100,000 Tech Seed loan from the Foundation for Technological Innovation and secured its first venture capital investment from Urban Us, a leading investor in start-ups that are transforming cities to fight climate change.
Since its creation in 2020 in Sion in the canton of Valais, Urbio's solution has been adopted in eight commercial pilot projects with industrial partners, and has received multiple grants and innovation awards, notably from the Swiss Agency for Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Hasler Foundation, EPFL's Tech4impact and Enable, and the Herbert & Audrey Rosenfield Fund, in order to improve and transfer the technology to the market.
